Report of the Commissioner of Patents for the year ..
This is an annual government report from the United States Patent Office, printed in Washington in 1849 for Congress and the public, listing patents granted that year. Its pages are numbered engraved plates of mechanical drawings, each figure labelled with a patent number and letter keys. A designer can take from them the dense, rule-bordered plate layouts and the clean line-engraved technical diagrams of 19th-century machinery.
